The present invention relates to a product configuration design aiding system. More specifically, the present invention is directed to such a product configuration design aiding system which is suitably employed in design aiding of ordered products, by which specifications of the products which constitute a base are changed in response to requirements of customers so as to design configurations of product specifications.
A configuration designing operation of an ordered product corresponds to such business for exclusively defining a product configuration which satisfies a specification required by a customer by selectively employing various specification items which have been previously set by a product designer and by combining the employed specification items with each other. Generally speaking, there are many possibilities that sales staffs and technical sales sections which are contacted to customers perform the above-explained business as a configuration designer.
In order that a configuration designer who is not a technical expert of a relevant product determines feasible combinations while the configuration designer confirms one by one complex restriction conditions related to a specification item by using a large amount of technical documents written on papers, a plenty of time is required, and in addition thereto, erroneous arrangements and inquiries for a product designer may occur, which may cause a factor of a cost-up matter.
Very recently, in order to improve efficiencies of such business, configuration designing/estimating operation aiding systems with employment of computers have been used, while these configuration designing/estimating operation aiding systems are referred to as configuration systems, or configurators, which are described in NIKKEI DIGITAL ENGINEERING, June in 2002, on page 32, NDE REPORT: “Reduction in estimation steps of product having complex configuration by Hitachi.”
Conventional configurators can select specification items within a previously set range for the specification items. Moreover, there are many possibilities that non-standard discrete specifications outside the expected range are contained in such specifications required by customers for ordered products such as industrial appliances. In such a case that since there is no selection branch which is fitted to the required specification, configuration designing works cannot be carried out in the configurators. As a result, the investigations must be required for the product designers, so that it is not possible to avoid that a total step number of the product designers is increased, and lead times are extended.
Specification values available for specification items cannot be always and independently set, but own mutual relationships. When a certain specification item is selected and a specification value thereof is determined, there are some cases that specification values of other specification items are restricted. In particular, a very heavy work load of checking this restriction relationship has been given to configuration designers as to products whose component quantities are large and whose specification items are large.